Farewell 2015

And then place this box – after giving it a couple of good kicks to exorcise the bad stuff and raising it a few times to celebrate the good stuff – right in front of us, and use it as a step, a higher vantage point for looking to the future.

Wishing all of us for 2016 NOT to be a good year, but for 2016 TO BE A GLORIOUS YEAR!

— and now in the higher words of Konstantinos Kavafis:

The first step

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:

“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”

Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.

To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.

Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.

To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.”